Are you having difficulty finding textbooks for a course that you teach? If you are an ESL/EFL teacher and are looking for a coursebook for a particular group of students, you are welcome to send us your ideas on topics/areas that you would like to see covered. Your input will help us identify markets that Athelstan, as a smaller publishing company, may be able to develop titles for. Our strategy over the next decade is to produce a variety of texts, targetted at specific language learners. You can send email to Michael Barlow at barlow@athel.com. We are also aiming to develop a series of e-books for language learners and for language teachers.

We are starting a new series of ESL books under the imprint CorpusLAB in order to produce textbooks that help students with the English that they will encounter rather than the "textbook" English that arises when authors use their intuitions to create language learning materials. Recent research has shown that the language of textbooks---the vocabulary and the grammar---often differs from the language actually used by native speakers. That is, the textbooks tend to follow the well-worn English teaching path of focussing on tenses, the three conditionals etc. rather than assessing, via empirical corpus analysis, the important features of language usage today.

The creation of language teaching materials is a complex process involving linguistic and pedagogical considerations. We do not suggesti that it is desirable to simply throw authentic sentences in a textbook, but we take the view that a corpus analysis involving the identification of key patterns, the collection of frequency information and collocational data form the first step in the development of language learning materials.

Corpus research also highlights the need to think about the ways in which English usage changes depending on the situation, not just written versus spoken English, but English in different social situations and English for Business, Technology, etc. The first book in the series, American Phrasal Verbs, is aimed at Intermediate/High Intermediate students and covers the most frequent phrasal verbs in English in everyday and professional settings. As part of the research for the book, we examined the frequency of phrasal verbs in spoken and written texts and looked at the most common meanings of those phrasal verbs. When we examine the phrasal verbs used in Business English, we find that while many of the general English Phrasal Verbs are also frequent in Business English other phrasal verbs are particularly frequent in Business English. And, of course, we find that the terminology and idioms in Business English are also different. Because of these differences, we are publishing a Business Phrasal Verbs textbook.
Click on the following link if you want to read more on the rationale of the CorpusLAB series.